Rome Was Ahead. Then the Barbarians Caught Up.
Rome built a flattering story about civilization and the peoples beyond its frontier. Ancient DNA lets us test one narrow part of it, and the answer changes once time enters the picture.
The word “barbarian” can sound almost quaint today. In Rome it marked a line through humanity. On one side stood cities, roads, written law, and the imperial order. Beyond the Rhine and Danube, Romans imagined a rougher world of forests, war bands, strange speech, and people who had not learned how civilized life was supposed to work.
Tacitus gives us a much sharper example in chapter 45 of Germania. At the eastern edge of his northern world lived the Aestii, a people of the eastern Baltic whom he described within his survey of Germania. They alone, he wrote, gathered amber (glesum) from the shallows and beaches of the Baltic coast.
Tacitus then supplies the Roman explanation: “Being barbarians, they have not learned or even enquired as to its nature and origin.” The Aestii collected the lumps, sold them unworked, and—according to Tacitus—were astonished that anyone would pay for them.
To a Roman reader, this need not have registered as an insult. It expressed an assumed hierarchy of knowledge: the Aestii supplied the raw material, while Rome identified, valued, and refined it. The passage is revealing precisely because Tacitus presents that hierarchy as self-evident.
Two thousand years later, the stereotype is difficult to kill. Rome still appears as the natural centre of European civilization; ancient Germanic peoples appear as muscular men waiting beyond the frontier until history finally lets them in.
Ancient DNA creates a new temptation: to turn that old cultural ranking into a biological one. Did northern populations carry fewer genetic variants associated with education-related outcomes in the periods being compared? And how did the difference change as migration, admixture, and demographic turnover reshaped both regions?
Why use an education score when nobody in ancient Germany was sitting school exams? Educational attainment is one of the best-powered behavioural traits in modern genetics. Its polygenic score overlaps strongly with intelligence—the reported genetic correlation is about 0.70—and more modestly with traits such as conscientiousness, motivation, persistence, self-control, and patience.
That makes EA PGS a useful, if imperfect, lens. It is not a civilization meter. It cannot read manners, literacy, political institutions, or individual worth out of a skeleton.
I compared ancient northern Europe with northern and central Italy, adjusting the scores for date and genome coverage. The first comparison establishes one fact: in the pooled early centuries, Italy is clearly higher in EA PGS.
But that average hides one of the most revealing turns in the data. The comparison looks different in the Republic, under the Empire, and during the centuries of migration.
The question, then, is narrower than the title: how did northern Europe and Italy compare in EA PGS before Rome, under Rome, and after the western empire?